90s Nostalgia for Bad Games: Dragon Warrior 3

In 1991 a gem of a game came out called “Dragon Warrior 3.”  It was released 3 years previously under the name Dragon Quest 3.  After a while Japan would decide to just flip the entire series over to Dragon Quest.

Personal Experience

Growing up I was quite late to get a Nintendo… actually very late.  My parents owned a computer which my dad did business on.  I played Pacman and Leisure Suit Larry on that sucker but had really not enjoyed the console life many had.  Consoles were expensive and Nintendo was selling their plastic cartridges at $100 a pop.

The Super Nintendo is released in 1990 in Canada.  The same year regular Nintendo consoles went on massive sales and my parents picked me up one.  Of course I was too young to really know there was a lick of difference because honestly, not a lot of people had gaming consoles.

So it should not be weird at all that my parents bought me Dragon Warrior 3 in 1991.  Game developers were still making games for the Nintendo all the way up until about 1995.  So even though my parents were about a decade late to the race there was still a lot of use out of that Nintendo.

Dragon Warrior 3 is one of the few games I simply have not finished.  It was my first look at sandbox.  It is also because of this game that I have such an angry view of sandbox games.

Every time someone goes on the forums and declares they want a sandbox MMORPG I honestly don’t think these people know what a sandbox is.

A sandbox RPG is cryptic as all hell.  There are no tips guiding your way.  There is nothing telling you where you need to go.  The game is full of all the tools you need to beat the game… but there’s no way to know how to get them.

That was Dragon Warrior 3 in a nutshell.  As a child with an infinite amount of patience I could forgive the game for being so cryptic because honestly… I didn’t know better.  I spent endless months on this game just trying to push myself further.

The game did have a lot of unique and new features.  The game had a night and day cycle.  In the night time different enemies would come out than the day.

The game also featured a class system in which (unlike Final Fantasy) you could choose what allies you had.  Each class had its strengths.

But honestly all of this was just a trap.  In all of my months playing this game I found out you need a Merchant class (the single most useless class) in order to beat the game.

It’s kind of like in Megaman when you get that boomarang ability and its utterly useless but it is how you kill the last boss.  Same concept.

The game also seemed to be devoid of a white man, a healer class.  This of course is once again a trap.  The healer class is actually a class called the “Goof Off” or the “Jester.”  This character was also quite useless.  Whenever you would tell him to attack a lot of times he’d just goof off and do nothing.  At Level 20 he would transform into a Sage and become your most important group member… but until then you are carrying him everywhere.

So you have to carry around two useless characters… great.  The game offered you the ability to train up everyone and create various group compositions.  I think this was originally their intention but doing that is time consuming.  You have five classes in the game (Warrior, Fighter, Wizard, Merchant, and Goof Off).  The only way to level up is by beating enemies.  This basically means it will take you twice as long to beat the game because you are spending so much time just grinding out random monsters.

The game did have its charm.

My little brother was never really into games.  This game in particular was just too hard for the little tyke.  But there was a gambling part of the game that I let him play.  There is this monster battle arena in which you place bets on which monster will win.  There are various odds and every now and then the long shot could win.  I’d let him pick who would win and he’d get to pick and cheer for his champion.  It’d be great when he picked the slime (the weakest enemy in the game) and it’d beat a Green Wolf (one of the strongest enemies in the game).

One thing I never did do is beat the game.  The game is insanely hard and has some of the most punishing enemies any RPG has ever had.  I know when people think of JRPGs they think of these relatively easy grind fests where eventually you hit a certain level where you can just beat the game.

This is not that game.

Not in the slightest.  It is by far one of the hardest RPGs to come out.

A lot of this has to do with how smart the AI seem to be.  The AI seem to always pick off the lowest healthed and weakest targets.  This means that by having those heavy hitters (who you need to beat the last boss) you have people who are going to die a lot.

Saving the game revolved around going to some weird point and speaking with some random old guy… just to continue on the theme of this game being insanely cryptic.  You could spend hours grinding out levels and then lose it all in a single battle gone wrong.

I don’t know many people who have beaten this game… in fact i know of none… not a single one.  I setup a new YouTube series today in which I’m going to try and beat this game once and for all.

The game more or less got shelved for me once I got a Super Nintendo.  The new Super Nintendo came with a tonne of games.  This is because the Super Nintendo had been out for quite some time and I was once again late to the race.  I had tones of super easy super Nintendo games to crush.  This left Dragon Warrior 3 behind.

What Happened to Dragon Warrior?

Dragon Quest is the flagship title of Enix.  When they made Dragon Quest 1 they had a huge hit.  They continued to make clones of it and release them as new games.  Each release only had minor improvements, but people kept buying them.

The name Dragon Warrior comes from the idea that no one in North America really liked RPGs so no one would buy a “Dragon Quest.”  People were far more likely to buy a Dragon Warrior.  The box art even shows their attempt to trick people into thinking they were buying an action title:

Ironic that Enix is well known for this game, but Enix never made a single Dragon Warrior game.  They had always got other studios to make these games for them.

One big problem Enix had was intense market competition, with Square.  Square were the first people who really broke into North America.  Their Super Nintendo RPGs were all insanely popular and Enix simply did not have enough ambition to really see that Americans could enjoy RPGs like Japanese did.

They stopped shipping to North America.  Dragon Quest 4-6 would not be available in North America.  This represents every Dragon Quest game from 1991 all the way to 2000.

Square had taken this time to dominate the North American market and make all of their RPGs household names.

Enix attempted to test the waters of North America again with Dragon Quest 7… renamed Dragon Warrior 7.  The game would be released on the new and hip Playstation console.  In Japan the game was a big hit selling over 3M copies.  In North America it was a flop selling under 200,000 copies.  Worst yet the previous year saw Enix stock plummet down to nothing all because they had not released a game in a long time.

With their sales of Dragon Warrior doing so poorly they entered talks with Square for a merger.  Square had just released “Final Fantasy :The Spirits Within” which was a massive commercial flop as well.  Of course this was just a bad movie, not a bad game.

In 2001 negotiations ended and Square and Enix became a single entity “Square Enix.” With the new partnering they felt they could make a smash hit with Dragon Quest 8.  They released in for the Playstation 2… and it didn’t make a dent.  The brand was just not recognizable to North America and no one wanted to invest in an eight sequel to a franchise they had never heard of.

It was announced that all future Dragon Warrior releases would be released to handheld consoles.  Dragon Quest 9 would be released to the DS.

Dragon Warrior represents a Japanese phenomena that no one else really understood and that is the legacy that will stay with it.

90s Nostalgia for Bad Games: Sam and Max

It’s been a while since I thought back to the 90s.  But when I went to Steam and saw some Sam and Max games I could not help but think of an old game of the 90s, Sam and Max.

Personal Experience

Sam and Max first shows up in comic strip format.  The comic was rather unique because the characters in the story were very much aware that they were in a comic.  The characters would always relate to the fact that they’re just characters in a comic strip as they resolve their crimes.  Sam is a dog detective who has a nose for an investigation.  Max is a psychotic rabbit who supports Sam but mostly gets in the way and makes things harder.

The comic strip was released as a television series and as a game at roughly the same time.  It’s kind of interesting, the code for Sam and Max was made in 1988 as generic coding for Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion, arguably two of the most popular games of all time.  The game does not get released until 1992 and is titled “On the Road.”

The game was agrivating.  You had to find objects and use them at the right locations.  In a world without walkthroughs I might have spent a full session just looking for a stupid washroom key only to find out I never needed it.

The game featured a detective playstyle that will permeate throughout the years in various detective stories.  The genre is actually insanely popular.  Every CSI game ever made will involve this sort of stuff.  Might be a little improved but basically the same thing.

I never did finish Sam and Max.  During this time it was not exactly a crime to not finish a game.  Most games just went unfinished.  This is because skill caps went insane near the ends of games and games were mostly designed around not being finished.  I mean if you finish a game, won’t you stop playing it?  Interestingly enough game developers would start making games that are easier to finish so that they could sell their next title.

The game was fun though.  It had a lot of great humor and you would frantically waste all of your time trying to solve these investigative puzzles to try and get to the next humor bit.  The artwork in the game was also fantastic and all done by a single artist, the comic book author, Steve somebody or whatever.

So what happened to Sam and Max?

The genre was flushed full of the detective story.  Monkey Island was a far greater success than Sam and Max and because of this Monkey Island spawned 5 billion sequels and until recently Sam and Max was left in the dust.

It’s not without effort.

Shortly after Hit the Road a sequel was in development based around a space shuttle shaped like Max’s head.  The project was cancelled.

In 2001 again another sequel is being announced once again with a space theme.  In 2003 LucasArts cancels it again due to the market not fitting this genre.

The LucasArts hold on this title did not expire until 2007 when a company called Telltale Games started pumping out Sam and Max titles.

These were not natural sequels to the game.  They had simply gone too far in time.  This is nearly 15 years after the initial success of Sam and Max that they are making these.

These games were developed for the casual gamer and went on sale for less than $20 a shot.  Sam and Max has simply become the discount title in a genre that might be far too saturated.

90s Nostalgia for Bad Games: Sim Ant

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about games that I played in the 90s and a lot of it is trying to find out… what are these games named. It takes a long time to figure out exactly what these DOS based games were and when you find out what they are… you realize they’ve been quite successful. It’s weird thinking of this really fun game that fell off the face of the Earth… ad spawned 9 sequels.

This was not the case of Sim Ant from Maxis.

Personal Experience

I remember when I was a young man and the cheapest games available were simulations. Maxis has made a particularly powerful name for itself by making one of the strongest simulation franchises alive. They made a huge hit with their game “Sim City” and even more success with “Sim Tower” and “Sim Earth.” There was even a Sim Safari that did pretty well.

But one game that fell off the face of the Earth was, Sim Ant.

Sim Ant was the only educational game Maxis released. It gave detailed information about how ant communities work and created a largely realistic game.

In the game you start off as a mating ant, become a queen and start the formation of the nest. Afterwards you are born into a worker and you can interchange with any ant you want.

Ants came in three forms:

Workers: Fastest of the ants and are able to carry heavy food. Also expand existing tunnels to make more room for food and ant eggs.

Soldiers: Highest health and highest damaging ant.

Maters: Distribute food through the colony and can be sacrificed to the queen during food shortages. During season they flee to another area to make a new ant nest.

So this is the basis of the game. You can play all of the available roles and do all of the things ants do. You get food from the surface (in the form of peas). Your soldiers can also attack larger insects to make them into food for the colony.

You could control the behavior of each type of ant to favor certain activities so you’re not stuck with behaviors you don’t agree with.

Of course what you end up finding out is there are different breeds of ants, and they’re not always friends. The arch enemy of the black ant is apparently, the red ant. Both races of ants compete for space in the lawn as each builds colonies and expands creating competition for you.

As well the game has a meta strategy game where you are trying to inch the red ants off of the lawn by taking control of blocks piece by piece.

As a third part of the game are… humans. Humans come with a lawn mower and will mow the lawn and kill off large clusters of your colonies from time to time (as well as reds). By conquering the human’s side of the yard you force the human out of the game.

The game was simplistic and fun. At a micro level you can take control of a single ant and guide a platoon of ants to invade your enemies and conquer the wilderness. You could spend all of your time building tunnel patterns. You could spend your time collecting food.

Then at the macro level you could plan which plots of land you want to take over and corner out your arch enemies.

So why did it fail?

As Maxis developed its crown simulation franchises it found many successes with sequels with so many of their games, Sim Ant however was not one.

It honestly did not even have to be a sequel about ants. It could have been Sim Bear, Sim Coyote, Sim Bee, or Sim Pigeon. You could imagine how insanely profitable any of these games could be in a casual friendly mobile games market. Even revising and bringing back to life Sim Ant into a mobile game wouldn’t be too terrible. It surprises me to this day that someone at Maxis didn’t think of re-launching any of these games into the mobile games market.

The truth is, the folks at Maxis have had too much success.

It starts off with Sim City. Sim City is the power house of the sims games. Sim Tower was quite successful but there’s only so many ways you can simulate running a single hotel. Trust me a million developers have tried to make this game and it always ends up being the same thing. Sim City despite it’s very basic design and lack of realism is a hit. It makes a crashing success on Super Nintendo and PC. It becomes so great that Maxis develops a collection of Sim City games including Sim City, Sim City 2000, Sim City 64, Sim City 3000, Sim City 4, and SimCity Societies. Each of these games was a massive hit with insanely high reviews. Sim City was the bread and butter of the simulation community.

After Sim City, Maxis created a game that had unexpected results. Maxis created a simulation game that was supposed to simulate relationships and personal and family development. It was simply called “The Sims” and it was pitched as you controlling residents of Sim City. The Sims proved to be more successful than anyone can imagine with two sequels and each sequel coming with over 50 expansion packs.

It’s ironic I suggest Sim Ant as a mobile game because The Sims 3 is one of the most popular mobile games on iPhone Store, Android Store, and Blackberry Download.

Maxis would develop another massive commercial success in Spore. Spore much like The Sims was dynamic. It provided an infinite number of play through involving homemade storylines that would develop via a Maxis random universe engine.

The big problem with Maxis is that they just have too much “good stuff” going on. As commercially popular as a mobile Sim Ant game would be they have better games on the table already. It should be noted that “The Sims” was inspired by the style of gameplay involved in Sim Ant. It should also be noted that Sim Ant was awarded Best Simulation of the Year in 1992. Simulation was very popular in the late 80s-early 90s and dominated gaming.

Sim Ant is a game that Maxis will just leave in the past. It was great for its time but this sort of simulation game has no place in this world. If Maxis didn’t have so much on their table you would see Maxis dominating mobile phones and Facebook.

90s Nostalgia for Bad Games: Duke Nukem 3D

So this series has ended up being far more popular than I could expect it to be. I have gotten a lot of requests for one specific gaming series, Duke Nukem.

But as I thought about it I started to realize that people weren’t actually talking about Duke Nukem… they were talking about Duke Nukem 3D. Duke Nukem is a largely unplayed because it is a 2D side scroller that was insanely un-fun.

Personal Experience

Duke Nukem 3D was produced in 1995 and was insanely popular. Much like Leisure Suit Larry. Duke Nukem 3D thrived on young teenagers who largely remained unexposed to partial nudity and vulgarity.

In today’s world nudity and vulgarity are pretty well everywhere. It’s hard to watch television without flipping through and finding some nip slip or some violent gangster rapped talking about how he is going to f**k someone up.

But in the early 90s the most popular television shows were the most popular television shows in the early 90s were the ones that were most popular for the decades previous. There was no world of South Park, Cartoon Swim, and Family Guy.

So when Duke Nukem 3D was released the pure sex of it intrigued everyone. In the very first level you are liberating a stripper joint from aliens… the perfect place for a pervert like Duke Nukem to start off his journey.

The game levels added something brand new to first person shooters, open ended sand boxes. There were vents that you could enter after busting into them. It was a world where nearly everything was destructible and the space bar offered you the ability to stuff dollar bills down a stripper’s bottom.

Each level gave you about 20-30 minutes of distinct playtime. Each level featured a large number of blocks that could be jumped on and an interesting group of aliens requiring tactics and considerable conceptions of priority.

The game featured a large number of difficulty modes AND a multiplayer mode that was insanely popular. Of course it was LAN but it was still insanely popular.

My favorite part was the large variety of themes of each level. When you look back at the priority of Duke Nukem’s targets you get a sense of what sort of man he is, the common man. He is out to save bars, strip joints, sports arenas and coke dens.

So Why Did It Fail?

There are a large number of Duke Nukem games that have come out in the last 16 years they include :

• Duke Nukem: Time to Kill (Playstation)
• Duke Nukem: Zero Hour (Nintendo 64)
• Duke Nukem: Land of the Babes (Playstation)
• Duke Nukem: Manhattem Project (PC)
• Duke Nukem Advance (GBA)
• Duke Nukem Mobile (iPhone)
• Duke Nukem Mobile 2 Bikini Project (iPhone)
• Duke Nukem: Critical Mass (Nintendo DS)
• Duke Nukem Forever (PC)

This is nine attempts to try and re-make the initial success of Duke Nukem 3D which captured close to 100% of the first person shooter gaming market.

Each attempt was in the direction of failure for one reason, people are desensitived to swearing, nudity and violence. That combination made Duke Nukem 3D a killer hit that everyone played.

But in a world that cannot get enough of cartoons swearing, the series has lost its edge.

I think the main culprit of this is probably… South Park. South Park’s first short spread via the Internet in 1995. Ironically, the same year Duke Nuke 3D came out. In 1996 Comedy Central commissioned South Park and after 4 full seasons of potty mouthing stop animation the series had to take a serious shift. Instead of being about gory, potty mouthing inappropriate children it transformed into a digest for Stone and Parker’s political opinions. South Park essentially desensitized the same Duke Nukem crowd to violence, foul language, and nudity.

So really there was nothing Apogee could do to really resurface this game with its witty character.

This is exactly the reason why Apogee developed Duke Nukem Forever. Duke Nukem Forever would try and rely on solid game play and creative mechanics to steal the market back. Ironically one of the big complaints about this game was that it was simply a Duke Nuke skin… not a Duke Nukem game. On top of that its modernization was simply a Duke Nuken skin of Modern Warfare.

Unlike many games I’m relooking at Duke Nukem didn’t fail to produce a legacy, but instead destroyed its reputation. It’s legacy is one of terrible failure and cheap games of status quo. While other games series try to create something new, Duke Nukem 3D’s legacy is to simply copy what is popular and throw a Nukem skin on it.

It’s disappointing that one of my favorite games as a child is the $1 bin game today.

90s Nostalgia for Bad Games: Beavis and Butthead Virtual Stupidity

Continuing in my nostalgia series for 90s games I have found out that MTV will be bringing back Beavis and Butthead to their programming. In the spirit of this epic return I’ll be looking over one of my favorite childhood games, Beavis and Butthead Virtual Stupidity.

As always this series will look over old 90s games to consider what made them good then and why they didn’t find massive success. This game did have a strong following, but I’m looking for games like Civilization that have just become great house-hold names.

Personal Experience

I can remember my first ever Beavis and Butthead. My family was too cheap to get cable so we relied on our neighbors to tape good shows for my family to watch. The very first one they taped was Beavis and Butthead. I watched but one episode of it followed by an almost infinite numbers of Ren and Stimpy’s (the old dirty as hell one, not the new cleaned up one). Beavis and Butthead with their idiotic candor, great criticism of music videos and local tomfoolery drew my immediate attention and laughter.

Over the years I would make sure to watch every single Beavis and Butthead and made sure to see Beavis and Butthead:Do America in the theater. The comedic duo was genius. Today we look at slapstick humor focused around self-injury or self-shame. I do find these funny but I’ve always found the funniest stuff is when the whole situation and story is funny, not just a single bit.

Beavis and Butthead’s formula for success was pretty simple:

1. Create two main characters who are completely non-realistic and represent a casted out segment of society.
2. Surround them with perfectly normal people who have “normal” people dramas.
3. Have odd men out try and solve problems.

Every single situation caused a laugh or two.

The story of Beavis and Butthead is actually quite tragic. What you can draw from ad hoc evidence is that they were abandoned by their mothers to foster homes. Their fathers ran off with Motley Crue as roadies. Their foster parents eventually gave them up and left them their home (after moving away) that only had a half broken television set and an old couch. From there they continued going to school without questioning their shit end of the stick. They even had to get jobs at the local fast food joint in order to pay off bills.

Their sad story, unlike other sad stories, does not damper the humor of the show… it adds to it. The fact is that they were never able to put two and two together. They are always just really really dumb and unrealistic people. Their minds are very 1-dimensional and so whenever this topic comes up and the normal people are shocked they make fun of the normal people and anger them so much that they stop caring about the welfare of these poor teenagers.

Virtual Stupidity is released in 1995. It was a very strategic year. Every single PC with Windows 95 came with a sample disc of games. It provided somewhere around 50-60 demos including one of my favorite strategy games, Baldies.

Also on this disc was this Beavis and Butthead game, well some of it. It basically cut off what most people assumed to be the best part of the game. In the demo version you’d go around the school until you got to a mini-game involving hocking a lugi (for lamers out there you inhale snot into your mouth and mix it with saliva and spit it on someone) down the top of the school on the principle Mister McVicker who Beavis and Butthead deam “Mr. McDicker.”

Of course the game actually went on after this when you got the full version. The full version involved far more mini games and far more moments.

Beavis and Butthead Virtual Stupidity is more of a game you watched rather than one you played. The game followed what has become a standard mystery solving format. You have a character with a limited number of possible actions and the ability to pick things up. You have to pick up items and interact with objects efficiently in order to move the storyline forward. This involves semi-complex combinations in order to solve a problem identified in the game.

But in Virtual Stupidity you would want to click on every single object and every single person just to see how Beavis and Butthead respond to it.

Because in truth, Beavis and Butthead was watched primarily by music lovers. Music lovers, especially of the rocknroll variety loved Beavis and Butthead’s criticisms of what is popular. So naturally their criticisms of people was just as interesting.

So Why is This Game Bad?

There are a lot of television based games that have out-lived the shows they are based on. Star Wars and Star Trek were making games decades after they were finished. In fact recently Star Trek Online went free to play, while The Old Republic will soon be launched. Sam and Max is a prime example of a television based game that continued to flourish.

Sam and Max would be a terrible game that would be covered in the future if not for the fact that it has lived on and done quite well. Sam and Max actually follows the exact same format at Beavis and Butthead, except instead of having two people it has a crazy bunny and a loveable yet gullible dog.

Beavis and Butthead fails specifically because it was such a great game. REALLY great games are hard to replicate if the show gets cancelled. If the show was still on the air and still quite popular you would have seen tones of Beavis and Butthead sequels and massive sales.

But unfortunately it’s time has simply, come and gone. The specific format that Beavis and Butthead had has become a very niche gaming market. Unfortunately the detective style game has vanished in popularity. It takes too much time, too much thinking and not enough of a reward.

Beyond this the actual cancellation of the show killed production of future Beavis and Butthead games. Unfortunately the company that made this game (Viacom New Media) vanished off the face of the Earth. As far as corporate deals go Viacom New Media was the CD-sales division of all of Viacom (including MTV and CBS). They sold this part of the company to Virgin (now famous for Virgin Mobil). Virgin decided to close down this company in 1997 (making this game abandonware).

As a matter of fact MTV made MTV Games which focuses on music based games (Rockband types). So if a Beavis and Butthead game was to be released, it would just be rockband with some criticisms from the colorful duo. Without MTV’s support it would be hard if not impossible to get all of the artists and voices of Beavis and Butthead to work on a sequel.

The big killer I think to this game is replay value. Unfortunately the detective style “adventure” game is a one-time play. It takes a while to finish them, but once you finish it, it’s over. I spent a lot of time playing the original Beavis and Butthead simply because I didn’t really have a lot of options… it was a new computer with only one game to play. They usually go for about $20-30 which is low for a game.

Any developer will realize immediately, there is no market for anything like this. If anything you may see cleaner 3d version of it come out, similar to Leisure Suit Larry Magna Cum Lada. It will be nothing like it’s original… and will bomb.